Area health professionals expressed enthusiasm and caution over the release of a study showing that new medication could dramatically lower bad cholesterol while raising good cholesterol levels.

“Wow! This is really cool,” said Dr. Harvey Cohen, an internal medicine and geriatric medicine specialist with a private practice in Rancho Cucamonga. “This is a good preliminary study that shows promise. But the jury is still out. I’m always cautious when a new drug comes out. Sometimes after the drug has been approved by the FDA, problems show up.”

The drug is called anacetrapib, and the medical commuity is buzzing about the results of the 1,623-patient study released Wednesday at the American Heart Association conference in Chicago.

But the drug will not be on the market anytime soon. It needs more testing to see if its dramatic effects on cholesterol will translate into fewer heart attacks, strokes and deaths. To answer that question, Merck & Co., the drug’s maker, announced it will enact a 30,000-patient study that will take several years.

Cohen said the larger study will include samples of diverse ethnic groups, something that is needed because different races might respond differently.

Roger Klotz, an assistant professor of pharmacy practice and administration at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, said that “this is potentially a significant advancement, but not revolutionary.”

He said people who have been able to control bad cholesterol with other medications while maintaining reasonably high levels of good cholesterol might not experience any real benefits from switching.

He noted that the statin family of cholesterol-lowering medications, such as Lipitor and Zocor, also produces benefits in reducing inflammation, which some say cuts the risk of Alzheimers and other ailments.

Dr. Raymond Yen, a cardiologist with practices in San Dimas and Covina, said raising good cholesterol to high levels may not produce improved outcomes.

“It’s an unknown,” he said. “This shows promise, but much more needs to be done,” he said.

“We are trying not to be too giddy. The potential benefit is enormous,” he said.

For years, doctors have focused on lowering LDL, or bad cholesterol, to cut heart disease risks. Statin medicines do this, and generic versions cost less than a dollar a day. But many statin users also still suffer heart attacks, so doctors have been trying to get LDL to very low levels and to boost HDL, or good cholesterol.

Anacetrapib would be the first drug of its kind. It helps keep fat particles attached to HDL, which carries them via the bloodstream to the liver.

Merck says it is way too soon to estimate how much the drug would cost, but analysts say such a medication could mean billions for its maker, though it would have to prove cost-effective by preventing enough heart attacks, strokes and deaths.

The Merck-sponsored study tested anacetrapib in people already taking statins because they are at higher-than-usual risk of a heart attack – half of the subjects already had one, and many others had conditions such as diabetes.

An LDL of 100 to 129 is considered good for healthy people, but patients like these should aim for under 100 or even under 70, guidelines say. For HDL, 40 to 59 is OK, but higher is better.

After six months in the study:

LDL scores fell from 81 to 45 in those on anacetrapib, and from 82 to 77 in those given dummy pills.

HDL rose from 41 to 101 in the drug group, and from 40 to 46 in those on dummy pills.

Such large changes have never been seen before, doctors say, and these improvements persisted for at least another year.

Other drugs have generated excitement in early research, but then turned out to be risky or not as effective when tried on a greater number of patients.

The Merck study was too small to tell whether anacetrapib lowered deaths, heart attacks or other heart problems. But the trend was in the right direction, with fewer of those cases among patients on the drug. The anacetrapib test group also needed significantly fewer procedures to fix clogged arteries.

There were no signs of the blood pressure problems that led Pfizer Inc. to walk away from an $800 million investment in torcetrapib, a similar drug it was developing four years ago.